The start of mass vaccination against coronavirus does not go smoothly and painlessly. From time to time, there are reports in the press about the next unfortunate people who died after vaccination. The connection between these two events is not always direct. The most high-profile case is 33 elderly residents of nursing homes in Norway who died after being vaccinated. What is known about the side effects and safety of coronavirus vaccines at the moment?
Norwegian case
The first reports from Norway have raised concern as the world is listening to early indications of potential vaccine side effects.
"We are not alarmed, " Norwegian Medicines Agency medical director Steinar Madsen told Bloomberg on Monday. " Obviously, COVID-19 is much more dangerous for most patients than vaccinations."
Doctors do not hide the fact that the side effects of vaccines can aggravate underlying chronic diseases.
According to the latest data from Norway, 33 people aged 75 and over have died after being vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech. All of them are said to have been seriously ill already. At the same time, more than 48 thousand residents of nursing homes have already been vaccinated - almost all of their population.
Thus, it turns out that the death rate is less than one in a thousand vaccinated. Since the start of the pandemic, 521 people have died due to infection, 447 of them aged 70 and over, according to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
Cape Talbot, a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and a consultant to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, expected and feared that such deaths would provoke vaccine distrust: “Fragile, elderly people die, and they die often. I don't think people are aware of this. I was worried that we would introduce the vaccine and people would think that it was killing. ”
The professor was against the use of the vaccine primarily on the elderly and sick people in nursing homes, advising instead to vaccinate the staff who surrounds these elderly.
However, in many countries, it was the most vulnerable group of the population who decided to vaccinate in the first place. Now medical officials have to make excuses and defuse public tensions over vaccine fears.
"It is important to remember that every day in nursing homes in Norway kills about 45 people, so not the fact that it is unnecessary deaths or the presence of a causal relationship with vaccination," - said on Monday at a press conference, Director of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health Camilla Stoltenberg. However, she did not dare to name the exact reasons for these deaths - their analysis has not yet been carried out.
The director stressed that doctors who administer the vaccine to patients must, on a case-by-case basis, assess the risks and weigh the pros and cons of vaccinating weak or critically ill patients. She did not rule out the fact that in some cases, doctors should not have vaccinated elderly patients. After all, a week ago, the Norwegian Medicines Agency stated that fever and nausea (common side effects of RNA vaccines) "could have contributed to the death of some debilitated patients."
Where else have vaccine deaths been reported?
In Germany, more than 800,000 people have already received the first of two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine. The Paul Ehrlich German Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedical Medicines has reported seven deaths among the elderly. It is argued that the deaths could have been caused by major serious diseases, among which were noted carcinomas, renal failure, and Alzheimer's disease.
In Florida, the death of a doctor is being investigated, who died of a severe blood disease 16 days after vaccination. The 56-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist received the vaccine on December 18. He soon developed an extremely severe form of acute immune thrombocytopenia: blood did not clot properly.
Two deaths are known after vaccination in India. However, the local health ministry found no connection between the two events. In one case, a 52-year-old Indian died the morning after receiving the vaccine. Cardiopulmonary disease (purulent pockets in the lungs and an enlarged heart) was named as the cause. In the second case, the cause of death of a 43-year-old man is considered an anterior wall infarction with cardiopulmonary failure. He was injected with the vaccine two days before his death.
Severe allergic reactions
In mid-January, when at least 9 million people in the States received at least one dose of the vaccine, there were 29 known cases of anaphylaxis (severe allergic reaction) following vaccination. None of these cases were fatal.
In a scientific analysis, which was published a little earlier on a smaller sample (21 cases), it was stated that an anaphylactic reaction to the vaccine manifests itself in 11.1 cases per 1 million doses. This figure is significantly higher than in the case of influenza vaccines (1.3 cases per 1 million doses).
“The current known and potential benefits of current COVID-19 vaccines outweigh the known and potential risks of contracting COVID-19,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
From the important analysis: the median age for anaphylactic cases is 40 years, 90% are women, the average time for symptoms to appear is 13 minutes. At the same time, 17 patients had allergic reactions to medical products, food, or insect bites in the history of the disease, and 7 had attacks of anaphylactic shock.
What is the conclusion? Those giving the vaccine should interview patients for allergic reactions and be able to recognize and treat anaphylaxis.
“It's not at all surprising that allergic reactions happen. What is more important is their severity and the frequency with which they occur. When it comes to COVID vaccines, there is no doubt that the value of vaccination outweighs the risk, ” wrote Aaron Carroll, professor, and columnist for The New York Times.
For comparison, he cites data for Indiana, where the risk of dying from COVID-19 is "1 in 58" for the 60+ age group. In the age group from 40 to 59 years, the chances of dying with infection are 1 in 833. These indicators demonstrate that vaccination is needed, and the current level of allergic reactions against the background of the pluses can be considered insignificant.
Vaccines are not perfect, but they carry a lower risk of death than COVID-19. They usually take ten years to develop and market. A significant part of this time is devoted to long-term, detailed and massive clinical trials. In the situation in which the world finds itself today, vaccines have been developed at an accelerated pace, which will definitely have consequences. How serious they turn out to be, time will tell.
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